February 2016

Justin Turner is looking forward to leaping into 2016, but he’ll be leaping cautiously at first.

As a precaution and not unexpectedly, Turner won’t play in the first week of Cactus League games, Ken Gurnick of MLB.com writes.

Dave Roberts told reporters today that Turner, who is recovering from November microfracture knee surgery, remains on schedule for Opening Day, and that he can get at-bats in minor-league camp in the interim.

Howie Kendrick and Chase Utley will get some starts at third base in the meantime, Roberts said.

The headline reads: “Tommy John on Baseball Hall of Fame: ‘I’m being held back.’”

I immediately made a mistake. Before even reading the story, I said to myself, “Tommy John is not a Hall of Famer.”

I’ve looked at his numbers before, and have acknowledged how important he is to the game, having come back from receiving a baseball death sentence at 31 years old, then having experimental surgery on his torn elbow ligament — a surgery named after him — by the legendary Dr. Frank Jobe and pitching another 14 seasons.

My memory clouded my judgment. I’m old enough to remember Tommy John’s final unspectacular years, but not old enough to have seen his greatness, particularly when he pitched for the Dodgers from 1972 to 1979. So the lasting memory of him for me is as a soft-tossing, aging left-hander.

But I’ve never fully delved deep into Tommy John’s candidacy for the Hall of Fame. (The closest John came to election was his last year of eligibility on the writers’ ballot, 2009, when he received 31.7 percent, well short of the 75 percent needed for election).

As a prelude, Kershaw will be on the mound when the Dodgers open their Cactus League season Thursday at Camelback Ranch agains the White Sox.

Los Angeles has won all five previous Opening Day starts by Kershaw, though he has a no-decision in two of those. For you trivia buffs, the winning pitchers on Opening Day in 2012 and 2015 were Josh Lindblom and Joel Peralta.

Since it was revealed that Sandy Koufax no longer has an official, formal role with the Dodgers, there has been some concern. Koufax released a statement today through the Dodgers to address that:

“I’m 80 years old and I have retired. I have not quit. I’m still part of the Dodgers organization and always will be especially as long as Mark and Kimbra Walter are part of ownership. I will do most of what I have done in the past with no official title. I hope all the players, coaches, manager and everyone else in the clubhouse have successful and healthy seasons with a spectacular ending. See you Opening Day.”

“Whether or not he’s officially here, he’s still around,” Kershaw said of Koufax, who has ended his three-year stint in the front office but visited the club on Friday. “I don’t think it will change much for me. Sandy cares about us as a team, and I think he will be around when he can, and he’ll watch our games.”

Pedro Guerrero’s slide that wasn’t into third base still haunts me. And it was 30 years ago.

Guerrero was at his peak — in fact, he was at everyone’s peak. Having hit 15 home runs in June 1985 alone, finishing the year with a National League-leading .999 OPS and 182 OPS+, Guerrero was the rightful NL Most Valuable Player, even if voters didn’t see it that way.

When Guerrero arrived at Spring Training in 1986, he seemed more than a little aware of his stature. But the media played into that. Some of the coverage bears a striking resemblance to that of Yasiel Puig over the past 2 1/2 years, in that things that should have been unremarkable were treated as the opposite.

According to Gordon Edes of the Times, there was a pool among the beat writers, players and even “a certain manager,” betting on when Guerrero would actually show up in Vero Beach. (Bob Hunter of the Daily News won.) But Guerrero wasn’t late to Spring Training. He was more than on time. He just wasn’t as early as others.

Guerrero did admit to Edes that if it were up to him, he would skip Spring Training entirely. “But if I do that and hit .210, you guys (reporters) would be all over my butt,” he said.

So Guerrero arrived. He had one hit in his first 16 at-bats, then suddenly smacked six doubles and a triple as Grapefruit League play heated up. No one worried about Pedro Guerrero, the player who was, as I’ll never tire of quoting Bill James as saying, “the best hitter God had made in a long time.”

This week at MLB.com, MLB Statcast analyst Mike Petriello wrote about the top outfield arms in baseball. His methodology in brief appears at the end of this post. I followed up by asking Statcast for some numbers specific to the Dodgers, and here’s what I got:

96.0 mph — Yasiel Puig

90.8 mph — Joc Pederson

90.5 mph — Scott Van Slyke

88.5 mph — Alex Guerrero

88.2 mph — Kiké Hernandez

87.7 mph — Andre Ethier

79.7 mph — Carl Crawford

Puig was 2.6 mph behind Houston’s Jake Marsinick, the top outfield arm in the Majors. Here’s a 99.4 mph throw that Puig made at Houston in August:

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